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Back Issues: Memoirs

In this week’s issue, Daniel Mendelsohn reviews Ben Yagoda’s “Memoir: A History” and discusses the ways in which the memoir has changed, from St. Augustine to the present. Mendelsohn writes,

After the Reformation, the Protestants took up the form, partly in response to the Puritan call for “a narrow examination of thy selfe and the course of thy life,” as the sixteenth-century divine William Perkins put it. The memoir as a negative examination of the self, a form in which to showcase our reasons to be, as John Calvin put it, “displeased with ourselves,” indelibly marked the Anglophone tradition thereafter…. It spawned a line of unholier-than thou first-person memoirs that has culminated in the memoirs of abjection with which we are surrounded today.

In a Comment called “Show and Tell,” published in the issue of August 24, 1998, Nancy Franklin addressed this development:

In the last few years, as the best-seller lists have seen a steady march of memoirs and biographies that tell all—or purport to tell all—an observer of our culture could reasonably conclude that we believe that a life isn’t worth living unless everyone examines it.

Franklin goes on to warn:

Confessional literature can be wearying because it is so often based on the fallacy that the unvarnished truth is the whole truth and the only truth. (It is really just another way of approximating the truth.)

Mendelsohn also takes up the question of truth in his piece:

The seemingly pervasive inability on the part of both authors and readers to distinguish “their truth” from “the truth” is itself nothing new in the history of modern literature; it brings you right back to issues that were already simmering away as both the memoir and the novel were emerging in their contemporary forms, at the turn of the eighteenth century. Yagoda is right to dwell on the curious fact that Daniel Defoe, the earliest major novelist in the English language, cast many of his novels as memoirs, thereby complicating a relationship that has remained vexed right up until the present.

The history of that vexing relationship was the subject of Jill Lepore’s “Just the Facts, Ma’am” published last year. Lepore discussed the penchant among Defoe and his near contemporaries Samuel Richardson, Henry Fielding, and Tobias Smollett to present their novels in the form of counterfeit historical documents, usually letters or journals:

Samuel Richardson insisted that he was merely the editor of Pamela’s letters, first published in England in 1740 as ‘Pamela; or Virtue Rewarded”…. This was a lie, but not a hoax; Richardson wanted his novels to be read with “Historical Faith,” since they contained, he believed, the truth of the possible, the truth of human nature.

The articles—and the complete archives of The New Yorker, back to 1925—is available to subscribers. Non-subscribers can purchase the individual issues.